Author Topic: The Manly Myth  (Read 2693 times)

Offline tpe

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The Manly Myth
« on: Apr 13, 2006, 07:52 AM »
An intelligent essay (with poll) from Newsday: http://www.newsday.com/ny-etman4699083apr13,0,4099497.story?page=1
You can vote at the online poll.  The results from 700 responses are given below.  :)

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ESSAY (W/ POLL)
The manly myth
What makes a real man? Hollywood and Harvard answer it different ways

BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON
Newsday Staff Writer

April 13, 2006


Heath Ledger, left, and Jake Gyllenhaal, in a scene from "Brokeback Mountain."
(AP Photo/Focus Features, Kimberly French)

The publication of Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield's book "Manliness" coincides with the DVD release of "Brokeback Mountain." The first is a verbose and abstract treatise, the second a terse and eloquent illustration of the topic: what it means to be a man.

On this issue, Hollywood provides a more nuanced analysis than Harvard does. In "Brokeback Mountain," Ennis and Jack, two wranglers who fall in love in the 1960s, belong to the same culture as the fictional characters played by Mansfield's hero, John Wayne. Cowboy notions of masculinity can't assimilate their love, but neither does their love erode their masculinity. The film is about the universal tension between defiance and conformism, between living free and living by a social code.

 The proper way to be a male has always been a difficult question, as Mansfield shows by quoting advice as old as Aristotle. But it is more fraught today, when traditional manners of manliness smack of unenlightened chauvinism. Masculinity is being constantly renegotiated, and men find themselves walking an invisible line, where self-assurance spills into arrogance, aggressiveness into bellicosity, stoic fortitude into cold indifference, sexual assertiveness into rapaciousness.

Mansfield tries to rescue manliness from all this fretful ambiguity by defining it as "confidence in the face of risk," a necessary form of bravado that he considers to be, well ... at risk. He worries that we live in a "gender-neutral society," which is a little like complaining that there's too much democracy in Iraq. If only.

How about the regular guys?

In Mansfield's moral classification system, men get assigned the virtues of a free and independent soul, courage, initiative, elan, which he groups under the rubric of thumos, an ancient Greek word that means spiritedness. He lionizes the exceptional male, the dauntless leader and battlefield hero. He spends most of a chapter on Teddy Roosevelt, but he has little to say of history's hordes of peasants, soldiers, truck drivers, admen, steelworkers, bankers and butchers. By insisting that real men lead and dominate, he slights all these non-presidents and Nobel non-laureates. Defining manliness by extremes is a rhetorical mistake, like analyzing contemporary womanhood by studying Marilyn Monroe. Real men are regular guys.

Bogged down in philosophy, Mansfield gets himself tangled in tautologies and rickety dualities. Men are hard; women are soft. Men are aloof, self-interested and controlling; women are sensitive, social and pliant. Tough, controlling women do exist, he acknowledges, but they are just acting like men. And while he professes admiration for Margaret Thatcher - whom he considers, like Wayne, a paragon of manliness - he also suggests that a culture of female demands has spawned a generation of wusses.

In his concern for the defiant side of men, Mansfield stints on a variant of masculinity that craves acceptance, seeks membership and requires rules. In actual men, "You gonna make me?" squares off against "This is my team." Even heroes make bargains with society. The military, the ultimate proving ground for masculine virtue, prizes total obedience above lone-wolf initiative.

You wouldn't know it from reading "Manliness," but this discussion takes place in the middle of a frustrating and murky war in which American brawn and martial thumos have been of limited use. The most iconic warrior to emerge from the military since 9/11 has been Pat Tillman, who elected to leap from the fake combat of professional football to real combat as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan. Tillman was killed by his own side, under circumstances that the Army lied about. His story has less to do with what he accomplished than with the way he was betrayed.

Manly men need opponents. If manliness has become more elusive, it is because social obstacles to asserting our personal prerogatives have become scarcer, softer and more shadowy. Today, less is forbidden. Self-indulgence is patriotic, and sacrifice is out of style. Easy credit makes it difficult to puff oneself up by spending money. Even wimps drive SUVs.

Terrorism, too, is a more slippery and much less satisfactory enemy than Communism was to Cold War he-men. Today, men who define themselves through defiance are left tilting at windmills - the "gender-neutral society," say (or Bill O'Reilly's campaign against the phantom "war on Christmas").

Going against the grain

In "Brokeback Mountain," Ennis and Jack do not live in a gender-neutral society. They face the full might of intransigence toward homosexuality, and their lives are warped as a result. On the surface, Ennis (Heath Ledger) is the more masculine member of the couple, a monosyllabic loner buckled to his work and stoic in his poverty. Mythic men are forged by renunciation, and Ennis gives up his shot at happiness, though for what remains unclear.

Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), by contrast, marries money, owns a warm coat, rails against deprivation and demands more time with his lover. But roles are rarely simple. It is the more feminine Jake who envisions the life they could lead together, and to hell with society's threats. It is Ennis who fears the risk and retreats to the spare domestic safety of his trailer. By Mansfield's definition, petulant Jack is manlier than hard-bitten Ennis. Yet Ennis, not Jack, hews to the dictum that a man's man sucks up suffering and does what society demands.

It's hard to watch "Brokeback Mountain" and not think that if the two of them just moved to New York City, or hung in there another decade or so, their lives would be so much easier, and the movie so much weaker. (These days, the city of Casper, Wyo., has an openly gay mayor.) The characters draw their nourishment from the obstacles they face. The story of their particular struggles with manliness feels dated because the rules have loosened. Society has moved on to exact different pounds of flesh.

The movie silently celebrates this slow and incomplete revolution, yet change brings new kinds of hardship. Men worry less about their masculinity when the rules for attaining it are absolutely clear. That's why we honor athletes who excel at narrow and repetitive tasks, such as whacking a ball with a bat. We celebrate not their gumption or initiative - their thumos, as Mansfield would have it - but rather, their single-minded devotion to executing the task they have been assigned.

In the 19th century, social roles were more circumscribed, and they were metaphorically encapsulated in symphonic music, an art form that fulfilled the epic-making role that movies and professional sports do today. Beethoven, especially, conceived the symphony as the narrative of a young man's struggle for wisdom, pitting the individual in the form of a vigorous tune against an armature of harmonic conventions.

Romantic music thrives on conflict, and the development section of a sonata-form movement, in which wild dissonances and erratic rhythms try to hammer the tune out of recognizable shape and seductive secondary melodies try to lead it astray, is a parable for life experience. The buffeted hero must plumb his core and learn what elements are crucial to his identity, which emerges, shining and intact before the movement ends.

Music as mood setter

Think of the sequence of manly hammer blows that launches Beethoven's Fifth, which atomizes into rhythmic patterns that survive windblown harmonic adventures and savage mood swings, to return in swagger and glory at the end of the first movement. In that particular symphony, the character's story stretches across all four movements, concluding in spasms of celebratory C-major fortissimo.

This symphonic trajectory is typically read as a triumph of the will. The heroic tune asserts itself in the opening measures, fends off chaos and returns in serene glory. But there is also another dynamic at play, one that speaks of resignation as well as triumph. The 19th century symphony invariably begins and ends in the same key, a reassertion of social order, a slamming shut of whatever Pandora's Box of invention the composer has opened in the middle. For a symphony to embody masculine triumph, the center must hold, and the rules must win.

The protagonist of virtually all symphonies is male, and sometimes a specific man: Napoleon in Beethoven's Third Symphony (though the composer later changed his mind about that), a strung-out poet in Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique." The issues become more explicit in opera, where women who defy conventions generally die, and errant men regularly redeem themselves.

In the 19th century, it was understood that men earned their manliness by testing and then bowing to society's strict rules. These classic works, which are still commonly performed, follow archetypes that we have inherited, and the ambiguous dynamic of maleness continues to apply.

There is something unnerving, not to say unmanning, about rules, even bad, oppressive rules, coming loose. Even minuscule increments of social adjustment can make it more difficult to be a man.

Several years ago, a Philadelphia law firm revamped its policies in order to promote a part-time female associate to partner without requiring her to return to full-time work. Secure in her talents and determined not to stint her young children, she had campaigned for a change that benefited other women, too. And theoretically, not just women: The new policy was, by law, gender-neutral.

The firm's young male attorneys were happy to stand aside and let their female colleagues storm the breach. But they were startled to be asked if they might avail themselves of the new option of part-time partnership.

"If I look at it intellectually, there's no reason men shouldn't do it," said a 36-year-old junior partner, who regretted missing so much of his young children's lives and whose wife also had a demanding career. "But I'd never consider going part-time. I'd see it as being too much of a stigma." Even at a relatively liberal law firm, manliness demanded caution.

Going back to nature

According to Mansfield, manliness is the attempt to impose a moral code on uncaring nature - "the assertion of meaning when meaning is at risk." In "Brokeback Mountain," Ennis and Jack commune on fishing trips, their lonesome excursions a meager substitute for the masculine roles on which they have such a tenuous grip. They don't actually get around to catching any fish, because it's the mountains and each other they seek. Only in the wilderness do they feel secure.

But masculinity is forged in the treacherous terrain of offices and living rooms, not in the moral comfort of the backcountry. Nature does not care whether a man with a gun can vanquish an elk, and the elk would certainly prefer he didn't. It is the man who invents the rules, determines the outcome and awards himself a score.

In most of America, where meat comes wrapped in plastic, performing such primal feats of maleness has a purely symbolic value. And when the game is captive quail shot at point-blank range, as in the version of "hunting" that Vice President Dick Cheney prefers, even the symbolism is debased. Men prove themselves with the vestige of a vestige, while all around them roles are being rewritten, strictures crumble and new ones re-form. What men need now is not confidence in the face of risk, but suppleness in the face of change.

It's no surprise that self-conscious assertions of manliness are associated with conservative politics. You might turn Mansfield's formulation around and say that traditional manliness is lack of confidence in the face of change.


Here are the results of the online poll from the site.  Go vote.  :)

Who's the manliest man?

 32.3%
John Wayne (226 responses)

 34.7%
The guys from Brokeback Mountain (243 responses)

 4.3%
Tony Soprano (30 responses)

 11.4%
Theodore Roosevelt (80 responses)

 1.0%
Bart Simpson (7 responses)

 9.3%
Arnold Schwarzenegger (65 responses)

 1.7%
Howard Stern (12 responses)

 5.3%
Margaret Thatcher (37 responses)

700 total responses



Offline chameau

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Re: The Manly Myth
« Reply #1 on: Apr 13, 2006, 08:05 AM »
Thank you TPE, very interesting
La dictature c'est ''ferme ta geule'', la démocratie c'est ''cause toujours''
 Jean-Louis Barrault

Offline frances

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Re: The Manly Myth
« Reply #2 on: Apr 13, 2006, 08:10 AM »

In "Brokeback Mountain," Ennis and Jack do not live in a gender-neutral society. They face the full might of intransigence toward homosexuality, and their lives are warped as a result. On the surface, Ennis (Heath Ledger) is the more masculine member of the couple, a monosyllabic loner buckled to his work and stoic in his poverty. Mythic men are forged by renunciation, and Ennis gives up his shot at happiness, though for what remains unclear.

Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal), by contrast, marries money, owns a warm coat, rails against deprivation and demands more time with his lover. But roles are rarely simple. It is the more feminine Jake who envisions the life they could lead together, and to hell with society's threats. It is Ennis who fears the risk and retreats to the spare domestic safety of his trailer. By Mansfield's definition, petulant Jack is manlier than hard-bitten Ennis. Yet Ennis, not Jack, hews to the dictum that a man's man sucks up suffering and does what society demands.


Very interesting, indeed.

Mrs Thatcher, OMG  ;D

My candle burns at both ends / It will not last the night / But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends / It gives a lovely light (Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Offline Sassenach

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Re: The Manly Myth
« Reply #3 on: Apr 13, 2006, 10:38 AM »

Very interesting, indeed.

Mrs Thatcher, OMG  ;D



*agrees*

M.Thatcher and Bart Simson???!   *lmao*